设立的宗教裁判所来烧死她。我相信,教室里还有另一个姐姐。除了
她的家庭教师不久前发疯溺水身亡外,对她一无所知。我敢肯定她是
可恶的。所以你看,可怜的塞巴斯蒂安除了甜美迷人之外,真的没有
什么可做的了。
“It’s when one gets to the parents that a bottomless pit opens. My dear,
such a pair. How does Lady Marchmain manage it? It is one of the
questions of the age. You have seen her? Very, very beautiful; no artifice,
her hair just turning gray in elegant silvery streaks, no rouge, very pale,
huge-eyed—it is extraordinary how large those eyes look and how the lids
are veined blue where anyone else would have touched them with a finger-
tip of paint; pearls and a few great starlike jewels, heirlooms, in ancient
settings, a voice as quiet as a prayer, and as powerful. And Lord
Marchmain, well, a little fleshy perhaps, but very handsome, a magnifico, a
voluptuary, Byronic, bored, infectiously slothful, not at all the sort of man
you would expect to see easily put down. And that Reinhardt nun, my dear,
has destroyed him—but utterly. He daren’t show his great purple face
anywhere. He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded
out of society. Brideshead won’t see him, the girls mayn’t, Sebastian does,
of course, because he’s so charming. No one else goes near him. Why, last
September Lady Marchmain was in Venice staying at the Palazzo Fogliere.
To tell you the truth she was just a teeny bit ridiculous in Venice. She never
went near the Lido, of course, but she was always drifting about the canals
in a gondola with Sir Adrian Porson—such attitudes, my dear, like Madame
Récamier; once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere
gondolier, whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me such a wink.
She came to all the parties in a sort of cocoon of gossamer, my dear, as
though she were part of some Celtic play or a heroine from Maeterlinck;
and she would go to church. Well, as you know, Venice is the one town in
Italy where no one ever has gone to church. Anyway, she was rather a
figure of fun that year, and then who should turn up, in the Maltons’ yacht,
but poor Lord Marchmain. He’d taken a little palace there, but was he
allowed in? Lord Malton put him and his valet into a dinghy, my dear, and
transshipped him there and then into the steamer for Trieste. He hadn’t even
his mistress with him. It was her yearly holiday. No one ever knew how
they heard Lady Marchmain was there. And, do you know, for a week Lord